Quiet Professionals, Noisy Machinery

Category Archives: When Guns Are Outlawed…

In England, where guns are just barely short of outlawed (and whence English anti-gun activists infected the same EU that they’re now Brexiting with the same magical belief), all violent crime is at an end.

Yeah, riiiiiight. Police are still responding to scenes like this:

[P]olice found Natasha wrapped in a blood-stained duvet in a cupboard under the stairs at her home in Bournemouth.

[Prosecutor Sally Howes] said: “The body was curled up into the fetal position. Her body was rigid, her eyes were open and fixed.

“She was not breathing, she had no pulse, she was very cold to the touch and completely unresponsive.”

Uh, that’s not ‘pining for the fjords,’ ma’am. That’s “dead.”

The barrister said police found three notes written by [perp Jay] Nava, including one apologizing to Natasha’s mum Shelley.

It said: “Tasha died at 11. I was ashamed to take my own life. She was the only person that I loved and loved me.

“Shelley, I’m sorry for hurting your daughter. I’ll take my own life soon, I loved her. Why I did this is beyond me… that’s why I killed myself.”

Another read: “I wish I had a gun to shoot myself, if I did it would have been done by now but I needed to get all the kids away as they shouldn’t see this.

This guy wanted a gun, but to off himself. Gun control advocates think this is a bad thing, but really, what’s better, this guy in Hell now or him getting out of British prison in the usual ten or fourteen years, still with the character and impulse control that put him inside in the first place?

“I’m very weak and scared, I have been for a long time now. I’ll see you again Tasha in the next world x.”

Not if she sees you first, we think. Chicks may generally dig jerks, but there’s a time to draw the line. If she can’t do it before he kills her, presumably she can after.

What, exactly, did he do?

A soldier on leave who stabbed his girlfriend 11 times told a child that blood on the walls was “ketchup” after she found the young mom lying dead under a blanket, a court heard.

Great. A soldier. There’s millions of us, and only one that makes the news is this crumb.

Jay Nava, 27, tried to kill himself after butchering Natasha Wake, telling a cop who intervened to save his life: “I want to die,” jurors were told.

Pity that the cops are not in the wish-fulfillment business. For that particular wish.

Nava is said to have rowed with on-and-off girlfriend Natasha, 26, after she discovered he was investigated by police for an alleged sexual assault.

So impulse control is not a new problem for Jay.

She was stabbed with such force six of the wounds went through her torso and out of her back.

Lord, have mercy.

One young child was “woken by a scream” and came downstairs to ask Nava for a drink, jurors heard.

Prosecutor Sally Howes said “She saw him in the kitchen. He had a knife in his trousers. There was red spots on the blade and handle.

“She recognized the knife as the one Natasha used to cut onions. (Nava) had blood on his shirt and trousers.

“She saw Natasha lying on the floor in the lounge with a blanket covering her.

“(She told police) the blanket had big, medium, and small red dots on, there was red on the walls.

That kid’s going to have issues.

“Nava gave her orange juice and said ‘Go upstairs and don’t come back down’.

Or else what? Was he threatening the kid, too?

“In the morning she asked why he had a knife in his trousers and why Natasha was on the floor.

“He said they were being silly, Natasha was asleep and it was ketchup on the walls.”

The soldier took the children to his grandparents’ home.

He then contacted his mum in Australia, confessed to killing Natasha and said he was going to kill himself, the court heard.

Cops found him just in time to revive him as they searched beauty spot Hengistbury Head near Christchurch, Dorset.

Funny how when it was time for him to check out, he didn’t go with multiple violent stab wounds, but something gentle and, apparently, easily reversed.

Nava began a relationship with Nationwide bank worker Natasha in January 2013, the court heard.

He joined the Army two years later and served with the Royal Artillery’s 29 Commando Regiment based in Plymouth.

We bet the Royal Artillery could come up with a creative way to get rid of this blot on the service’s escutcheon. Preferably involving a 203mm gun.

Alas, poor Akbar Salubiro. Akbar went out harvesting, but never returned to his Indonesian village. His friends began to retrace his steps, beginning at his back door. But what they saw from there told them they did not need to go far.

Village secretary Salubiro Junaidi said: “People had heard cries from the palm grove the night before Akbar was found in the snake’s stomach.

“When the snake was captured, the boots Akbar was wearing were clearly visible in the stomach of the snake.

“Resident cut open the belly of the snake and Akbar was lifeless.”

Reticulated pythons are boa constrictors that suffocate their victims before swallowing them whole.

Locals gathered round as one man used an 18-inch long hunting knife to slice open the serpent – and found Akbar inside still in tact.

The 25-year-old was still wearing welly boots, short and t-shirt when he was found inside the animal – which was sprawled out in his back garden.

Incredible footage shows the corpse being slowly removed from the killer reptile as the leathery skin is peeled away.

Neighbour Satriawan – who knew Akbar – said: “He was found in the location of the garden.

“Initially Akbar set out from his home to go to harvest palm, after not returning to his home people looked for him.

Well, at least they managed to recover his body for a decent burial, rather than have him eternally a town mystery disappearance… while providing enough of a meal for the snake that the beastly thing’d want another villager in another month.

Is it just us, or does the Republic of South Africa produce more than its fair share of weird homicides?

In this case, a youth from a wealthy family killed ’em all, or tried (a kid sister survived), and then called the cops with a transparent story that Sumdood did it.

Henri Van Breda, who handed himself over the police in September last year, is accused of murdering his father Martin, 54, a wealthy businessman, his mother Teresa, 55, and older brother Rudi, 22, in a frenzied early morning axe attack in the heart of South Africa’s western Cape vineyard area.

His younger sister Marli, who was 16 at the time of the attack, was left for dead on a balcony. She survived, despite a cut to her jugular vein and severe head injuries.

Van Breda appeared calm and smiled briefly as he appeared in the packed court room wearing a blue suite.

The case was postponed to April 24 because the defense said it had not received crucial DNA reports about the murder weapon from the state.

Van Breda, who is out on bail, has agreed not to contact witnesses, including his sister. He is also forbidden from being within 500 meters (yards) of an airport or a harbor.

Kind of amazing that a guy charged in a crime like this is bailed.

According to police, when officers arrived at the crime scene they found Van Breda sitting outside the house, wearing sleeping shorts and white socks stained with the blood of the victims. He was taken in for questioning and later brought back to the house, where investigators found a bloodstained axe and kitchen knife. He was later released into the care of an uncle.

Marli van Breda, who has been living with other members of the extended family, is suffering amnesia and unable to recall the incident.

That’s a relatively common occurrence, after being brained with an axe, actually.

On the morning of the attack van Breda had phoned his girlfriend at 4 a.m. but only called paramedics three hours later.

A recording of van Breda phoning the emergency services emerged in which he can be heard telling the operator: “My family and me were attacked by a guy with an axe.”

The flat that Oneal Ron Morris was fixing was not flat tires on a car, but flat tushes on trannies. No, not transmissions, guys who wanted to be women. Morris, who was not only President of the Butt Club For Men, but also a client, can be seen in the 2013 mugshot, left.

Is that supposed to be a woman, or some new … species… entirely? It’s like the medical condition known as steatopygia, common to some African bloodlines, only dialed up to 11.

But looking weird wasn’t the only result of getting the Fake-Doctor-Morris-Tush-Exploder treatment. As you can imagine, the guys who make silicon tire sealer like Fix-A-Flat never thought of submitting it to the FDA as a medical device, and as it turns out, this method and mode of deforming yourself can be no-kidding-graveyard-dead fatal.

A Miami-area transgender woman who allegedly injected women’s behinds with substances including tire sealant and cement has been sentenced for killing a patient.

Oneal Morris, who has become known as the “toxic tush doctor,” received 10 years in prison on Monday after pleading no contest to manslaughter and practicing medicine without a license.

In case you’re wondering why we make doctors, nurses, and pharmacists leap through the flaming hoops of licensure, Dr. Morris is Exhibit A. Which is hardly fair to real doctors, nurses and pharmacists.

Morris, 36, was previously sentenced to a year in prison under 2013 charges in Miami-Dade County, though Monday’s sentence in neighboring Broward County was much stricter.

Victim Shatarka Nuby. Like Morris, She’s A Man, Baby.

The new case involves one of the fake doctor’s victims named Shatarka Nuby, a 31-year-old who received injections from Morris to make her behind bigger starting in 2007.

Texas woman in botched butt injection used super glue: prosecutor
Nuby died in prison in 2012, and a medical examiner said that it stemmed from a “massive systemic silicone migration” from injections into her buttocks and hips.

The victim’s aunt told police that she was there on multiple occasions when the fake medical professional injected her niece, and that she told her the silicone was from Home Depot.

Morris, who allegedly injected tire sealant Fix-a-Flat and cement into women’s bottoms along with silicone, allegedly sealed the injections with super glue.

She said in court Monday that she would never use an unknown substance, including the sealant or cement, to inject someone, and added that Nuby was her friend, according to WSVN.

Morris was dressed more conservatively than in the old mugshot, but still very weird looking, on this trip to court (left). Some public defender earned his or her pay on this one.

Morris, and his (or her, he would insist) inflated posterior are going to be going to a male prison, at least until some hunk of the Fix-a-Flat comes loose and strokes him out. Until then, he should be popular with other inmates.

Now, we’re back to China again, specifically Hong Kong, where the hong escalator suddenly started going kong, reversing itself and dumping people all over the place. One shopper is seriously hurt, and a couple of mechanics are sampling the amenities of Hong Kong’s fabled jails after allegedly having tried to cover up their part in the screwup.

Two mechanics have been arrested for possibly tampering with evidence after a mall escalator abruptly reversed direction, launching confused shoppers to the ground below.

The 150-foot-long escalator at Hong Kong’s Langham Place had been carrying passengers upwards when the sudden change in direction occurred, CNN reports.

Among the 18 injuries, one man received a head injury and is in serious condition.

Video taken by security cameras as well as fellow shoppers captured the instant horror that occurred at the bottom of the shifting steel staircase Saturday afternoon as those caught on the escalator screamed and braced themselves.

Some more helpful members of the crowd below rushed over to try and catch people as they rocketed off the escalator.

Authorities say the mechanics have been charged with obstruction of justice for allegedly tampering with the machine after the accident.

What should you do if this happens to you? Be ready to get dumped in a pile of people. Keep your feet and knees together, knees slightly bent, and ready to execute a dynamite PLF. Stay clear of the mechanism at the end, and when you’re back on your feet, take immediate action to help your fellows, most of whom will not have reacted in time to avoid a nasty spill.

If the escalator keeps spewing people, keep pulling them away so that others don’t land on them or trip over them — and stay out of the line of fire yourself.

Three years ago, a sharp turn — and, perhaps, the usual Korean slapdash engineering and systems operation — caused an intercity ferry to roll. All ships roll in turns, but Sewol kept rolling, and sort-of-stabilized with a profound list… that guaranteed flooding, more list, and the vessel turning semi-turtle and slipping beneath the waves.

The crew did not cover themselves with glory, or even live up to the ancient honor code of the seaman. They saved themselves, or froze, disbelieving, in place. They ordered the passengers to return to their cabins and await rescue.

Rescue wasn’t coming.

The Republic of Korea did not have sufficient SAR resources for the conditions — naturally, it was dark, and the weather foul — or the sheer number of passengers. Few nations’ coast guards or lifesaving services would; they’re great at lifting a family of four from a dismasted yacht, or plucking the 8-man crew of a modern merchant ship from the sea, but hundreds of people would overwhelm anybody, and the ROKs’ lifesaving resources were overwhelmed.

Over 300 souls, most of them passengers, most of them children on a school trip, were extinguished.

This week, the ship was raised… to renew a disappointingly incomplete investigation (which so far has settled blame on the captain, who most certainly did not go down with his ship, and who has been threatened with the death penalty), and in hopes of recovering the remains of nine who are still missing.

The ferry, Sewol, was structurally unsound, overloaded and travelling too fast on a turn when it capsized and sank during a routine voyage off the southwest coast on April 16, 2014.

Bereaved families have been calling for the ship to be raised and for a more thorough investigation into the disaster. Officials also hope to find the last nine missing bodies.

Salvagers started to bring up the vessel, which has been lying on its side at a depth of 144 feet, late on Wednesday, and worked through the night.

Television pictures taken from the air early on Thursday showed the white 460-feet long hull, coated in mud and sediment, breaking above the surface, flanked by winching barges.

“The work needs to be done very cautiously,” Lee Cheol-jo, an official at the Ministry of Ocean and Fisheries, which is in charge of the operation, told a briefing.

It’s a hell of a thing, both that this is necessary, and that it is possible. A Clive Cussler tale come to life, but with no lost treasure or happy ending. And consider this:

A Chinese salvage company has fitted 33 beams beneath the hull with 66 hydraulic jacks inching the ship up.

There was a time that your go-to guys for marine salvage would have been British or Dutch. Then, there was a time where the know-how rested unquestionably in American firms.

Now, if you want to raise a ship from the depths and solve a mystery, you look to China. (We can barely build warships, any more, and no US merchant ship is ever built except for some government boondoggle). The raising of Sewol is a true extreme-engineering case, and her Chinese salvors are to be congratulated. (Not that they’re done yet, but they’re on track for mission completion).

There’s a lot to be learned from this accident, but we wonder if the highly politicized environment in the Republic of Korea is conducive to such learning. In our experience, only disinterested and professional investigators have any real hope of getting to the bottom (no pun intended) of such a complex accident. Adversarial proceedings and public hearings are almost certain to be useless, at least in terms of understanding what happened, and preventing next time.

Ah, those Englishmen. Gotta have their tea, even if they just got a call “See the woman, possible suicide.”

After the wild tea parties were over, the woman was found.

Dead.

Worse, the tea came from that suspicious Colonial tea vendor, Mickey D’s. What manner of Londoners were these strange rozzers?

Two police officers who went to McDonald’s to buy a cup of tea before responding to a suicide call have been allowed to keep their jobs.

Well, you really don’t want to have the tea after the call, do you? (And especially the biscuits… especially after some of the riper suicides).

PC Gavin Bateman and Tony Stephenson had received a call, graded ‘significant’ by the Met, shortly after midnight on April 16.

But rather than head straight to the home of a woman in Poplar, east London, deemed vulnerable by the London Ambulance Service, they waited 24 minutes before heading there.

Instead, the pair drove to the local fast food restaurant to pick up some refreshments and complete ‘administrative tasks’ before continuing with the call, a misconduct panel heard.

But by the time they reached the woman’s house, almost 40 minutes after a friend had called 999 when she received a suicidal text from the woman, the 22-year-old was found dead.

Yet today a Metropolitan Police disciplinary hearing gave the two police officers written warnings after they admitted misconduct but denied gross misconduct.

Amy Clarke, representing the Met, told the hearing: ‘The call was graded ‘S’, meaning significant, the more significant grading is ‘I’ which means the officer has to attend immediately.

‘PC Stephenson confirmed to the contact centre that they had accepted that call and that they were en route, that was at 00.03.

‘The CAD (dispatch system) went through to the vehicle so the officers could read the details which said ‘police requested for psychotic illness, significant risk to herself or others.

OK, so we get this deep in the story before we learn the two accused cops weren’t told it was an explicit suicide threat, but rather that it was a Crazy Lady call.

Anyone who has ever dealt with a Crazy Lady, copper or not, ought to know that fortifying oneself with the caffeinated beverage of choice beforehand is probably a good idea, and in most cases you will be facing an unpleasant but not life-consequential experience.

‘The officers decided not to proceed straight to the address and went to a nearby McDonald’s where they purchased refreshments before driving to a roundabout where they drank their drinks.

Let’s not lose sight of the fact that the officers didn’t kill her. Loon killed her self. It is quite difficult to keep a determined suicide from whacking him- or herself; it’s still worth trying, but the failure here is not the officers’. We think the verdict of “negligence deserving reprimand, not gross neg demanding firing” is just about right.

One last thing: if you get a text from a suicidal friend, maybe you’d better not count on Teh Authoritah to go to the friend’s aid.

Nope, not the kind that Snowflakes use to protest everyday life on today’s learning-free college campuses. More the kind that come attached to bulls.

Angry bulls. Bulls that you just stuck a little cocktail skewer into, and now are a mite peeved. And are looking to take out their rage on something human and dressed in red.

One is put in mind of all the old British jokes about the sexual orientation of Spanish Bullfighters. Only for the guy who received a near-foot-long bull horn enema, it was more like getting you-know-what without getting kissed.

Antonio Romero was horrifically gored during a bout with the furious beast in Mexico City on Monday.

The matador ended up with the bull’s horn some 11 inches up his rectum, causing “severe” injuries.

The stomach-churning clip shows Romero seemingly in control as he goads the animal with a red cloth, called a muleta. But something goes wrong as he tries to get the bull to pivot around him. The angry beast rears up, catching him on the arm and knocking him off balance.

As Romero stumbles back in an effort to avoid the bull’s deadly horns, the animal throws off the muleta and homes in on its helpless target. Now, with its tormentor in its sights, the bull takes its terrible revenge.

Here’s the video, but as usual with a goring (“cornada” en español), the action is over in a few seconds. (Quick work by the assistant bullfighters — forget what they’re called — in distracting the beast).

It was probably a bullfighter who first coined the smart-aleck comeback, “If it was up your [you-know-what] you’d know.” Well, now, Antonio Romero knows. He’s in hospital and will need more surgery than what the bull did to him.

An e-cigarette exploded and burst an entire bedroom into flames. Eight firefighters were sent to the two-storey semi-detached house in Oldbury, West Mids, after the e-cigarette exploded at around 1.40pm Nobody was injured in the blaze which charred the rooms wooden furniture and dangerously melted an extension cable. Pictures show the major fire damage in the front bedroom on the first floor caused by the e-cigarette

Hey, there’s another way that e-cigarettes can cure your addiction: by blowing you to bits.

Dramatic images show the devastating after effect of the blaze, which took place at around 1.40pm today.

Firefighters rushed to the scene in Oldbury, West Midlands, following reports of a first floor fire.

A double bed and wardrobes had caught alight after the device blew up in the two-storey semi-detached house.

Nobody was injured in the blaze which charred the room’s wooden furniture and dangerously melted an extension cable.

Oh, the humanity! A melted extension cable.

A West Midlands Fire Service spokesman said: ‘There was a fire in the first floor front bedroom of a semi-detached house caused by an exploding e-cigarette.

One wonders how many of these FOOMed unfortunates are the victims of using the devices within their specifications, and how many of them were trying to abuse them for the delivery of recreational pharmaceuticals.

Ah, the gig economy. You can be individual entrepreneurs, arbitraging firearms between South Carolina (where they’re mostly legal) and NYFC (where they’re mostly outlawed), and delivering them via Uber to customers.

But one thing that predates the gig economy: when you’re selling illegal stuff, one of your customers just might be an undercover cop.

And another thing that was here before the gig economy and will continue long after: the government doesn’t care how it spends its money or whether it’s achieving its ostensible ends. While a few gun sales would have been enough to bust these guys, the cop kept buying and buying and buying, ultimately paying them over $100,000 for over 100 guns. The profits they made from running guns to the NYPD were, in part, plowed back into running more guns to more criminals in New York, so NYPD was in effect financing criminals’ ability to gun up in their own five boroughs.

Smart.

Who do they think they are, the ATF? Nobody’s supposed to do gunwalking, but if you have to pick an all time champion gunwalker, it’s hard to compete with ATF. They’ve set the all-time record. We hope.

Anyway, on to these low-rent Merchants of Death, NYC streetcrime variety:

Shavar Stuckey, one of the gunrunners.

Shavar Stuckey, 31, and Levon Jackson, 30, who are half-brothers, are both facing a 203-count indictment that includes charges of fourth-degree conspiracy and first, second and third-degree criminal weapons sales, according to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.

Is anybody ever more than a half-sibling, in the ghetto? Asking for a friend.

It’s just amazing that these guys’ various baby-daddies didn’t bring ’em up right, isn’t it?

Devon Heatley, 32, and South Carolina residents Troy Allen, 32, Shakial Shephard, 22, and Liq’uel Robinson, 19, are also facing multiple charges for allegedly supplying the firearms for Stuckey and Jackson to sell, said the DA’s office.

The South Carolina men and Heatley would purchase the guns from firearms retailers in the South then bring them to New York City by buses they would take to Chinatown, according to the indictment Stuckey and Jackson would then bring them up to Harlem and the Bronx in cabs and Ubers.

Then again, come to think of it, NYFC is a gun-free-zone, but no one seems to have told the guns, especially the ones that are leaping into diverse young hands and urging them to acts of mayhem.

“The South Carolina residents would allegedly transport the guns to Stuckey and Jackson usually via the Chinatown bus lines and in doing so endangering the passengers, the drivers and the residents in Chinatown alike,” said Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance. “After they arrived in Lower Manhattan, it’s alleged they would hail an Uber or take a subway uptown to Stuckey and Jackson.”

LeVon Jackson, the other master-mini-mind

A backpack or briefcase full of guns is actually as inert as a bag of hammers, unless a human opens it up and actuates the firearm. So who’s endangered… and who’s grandstanding? Wait… Cyrus Vance… where have we seen that name before? Why, this CV’s dad was the Cyrus Vance who led the Carter Administration to foreign policy victories like the Iranian Islamic Revolution, and the narco-state of Panama. And the incompetent Secretary of State’s dad was the Cyrus Vance who was one of Roosevelt’s (F.D.’s) New Deal technocrats.

Between December of 2015 and March of this year, the pair sold the undercover officer 105 guns – including 75 semi-automatic pistols, 21 revolvers, 5 assault rifles, and 4 shotguns. Most of these sales took place in the detective’s car. The officer paid between $800 and $2,000 for each gun.

“I don’t know what you can say except its incredible that you can find these,” Vance said.

Actually, in the free world they’re common as the above-mentioned hammers. It’s incredible that one could be a law-enforcement official and not know that, but then again, we’re talking about a guy bred to socialism for at least three generations, and whose genes descend from the sort of intellect that thought the US’s best policy move was to encourage Khomeini to take over Iran. It’s a wonder he can use the restroom without a respite care worker.

No kidding. From whom? That’s not clear. Bet more than one is an NYPD heater.

Incidentally, what state provides the most guns traced by ATF in New York? (.pdf) If you guessed SC, or FL, or TX, go soak your head. The right answer is New York, for the last data available (2015), 1,350 of 4,863 total traces (27.8%). South Carolina? 266 (5.5%)

New York State crime is almost entirely urban, and mostly New York City crime. 3,621 of those traces were initiated in New York City. Three-quarters. (Okay, only 74.5%, we rounded up).

While the national average time-to-crime (really, time-to-recovery) of traced firearms was 10.48 years, New York’s was 3 1/2 years higher, 14.11 years. Straw-purchased firearms like the ones discussed in the article would have been traced much less than one year after leaving the retailer.

New York State is 100% effective in hassling peaceable gun owners, but all its gun control laws produce nil effect on local crime. This is predictable by the laws of economics, specifically, how market equilibrium results from natural responses to changes in supply and demand as signaled by price.

A shortage of any good produces rising prices, which stimulates importation, manufacture (including diversion or clandestine manufacture, if legal manufacture for the market is closed off), and substitution, until the market’s equilibrium is restored at the point where the demand curve (which goes down or is “negatively sloped” on a quantity/price graph) intersects the supply curve (which goes up or is “positively sloped” with the graph). In other words, all demands are ultimately met.

Post navigation

About WeaponsMan

WeaponsMan is a blog about weapons. Primarily ground combat weapons, primarily small arms and man-portable crew-served weapons. The site owner is a former Special Forces weapons man (MOS 18B, before the 18 series, 11B with Skill Qualification Indicator of S), and you can expect any guest columnists to be similarly qualified.

Our focus is on weapons: their history, effects and employment. This is not your go-to place for gun laws or gun politics; other people have that covered.

Why WeaponsMan?

A lot of nonsense is written about weapons, especially on the Net. Rather than rail at the nonsense, we thought we'd talk sense instead, and see how that catches on.